Back in 2000 the first episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer I watched was the season 4 episode This Year's Girl, which was obviously not a convenient episode to start with, but I enjoyed it. Immediately after I watched the Angel episode Eternity. I was under the impression that for both of those it was when they first aired, I know it was on a Tuesday from 7 to 9 o'clock central time on the WB. But what Wikipedia currently says about when these episodes aired doesn't line up with that, was I actually catching reruns that aired during the Summer?
Both gave me some wrong impressions about what happened before, but I like that. Prequel haters keep thinking it's a failure of Lucas that episodes Episodes I-III didn't happen exactly how they assumed from the way information was presented in IV-VI, but I know from experience even when a series was written in order you can get the wrong idea from watching it out of order. These episodes of Buffy/Angle had me thinking Faith had slept with Angel and that Angle turning into Angelus happened semi-regularly. (I had heard enough going in that I already knew Angel was a spin off and that Angel had been Buffy's boyfriend.)
I spent the next couple of years catching Buffy and Angel episodes on occasion. But I fully became a fan in late 2002, when Buffy was already in it's last season. What pulled me in was catching season 3 episodes as reruns. Thanks to all of the Rerunning I had managed to see every episode before the series ended.
Buffy held the status of being my favorite TV show pretty solidly until Pretty Little Liars took that position as it's Season 4b was airing. Thing is I spent a long time not caring about Buffy/Angel at all, it had been declining from my active nerdy interests before it was actually dethroned, and as soon as it was it became pretty much out of sight and out of mind.
Buffy's status as a Feminist show has become a topic of discussion as it's been reevaluated in recent years since Whedon's fall from grace. I honestly can't speak much to that since the Feminism never was why I was into it. The truth is I became the Feminist I am now fairly recently in the grand scheme of my life, even when I started these blogs in 2014 I wasn't all the way here yet. Maybe what Buffy did right played a role in subconsciously prepping me for it, but really when I was big into Buffy I was still fairly Conservative/Libertarian on gender issues. I was never a reactionary, I always supported the Feminist movements of the past, yet I was one of many Cis-Het white men naively assuming that battle was already won. I never considered going against traditional gender roles to be wrong, but I was not willing to say having them was inherently a problem. Now I've become a true Gender abolitionist, though my mind still struggles with the tendency to default to the Binary framework.
Even before I got into Buffy I already tended towards identifying with the female characters in the fiction I consumed, and being into female Superheroes. I'd already gone through a Xena phase and watched some Sailor Moon.
The fictional media I've consumed has played a role in making me the Feminist I've become. But mostly I'd say the credit for that goes to Pretty Little Liars and much of the Anime I've consumed. But also much of the analytical discussion of that media I've consumed, chiefly what Heather Hogan would write about PLL, and the perspective on Anime provided by VraiKaiser and Josienextdoor's WordPress blogs, and then on YouTube people like Digibro, ThePedanticRomantic and Zeria.
Much of the recent reevaluation of Buffy suggests that perhaps Whedon's Feminism always was more like where I was when I loved Buffy, someone who liked Strong Women but who's Feminism is still pretty Binary. But my point here is simply that Buffy didn't have much of an effect one way or the other on the development of my views on Gender, it's importance to me is in other areas.
Is Buffy another aspect of my Nerdy history that foreshadows the obsession I've developed with Anime? I think it's mostly how much Bathos there was in Whedon's sense of Humor that anticipates my modern opposition to Tonal Consistency. Xena was a show that jumped around a lot but each individual episode was still pretty tonally consistent.
Buffy played a big role in making me think about how to structure serialized story telling. Many have talked at length about the Seventh Episode factor Buffy had, it's not the only TV show to have it but it played a pretty big role in making me notice it. But what's more interesting is how for a long time I considered episode 5 the ideal point to introduce the Big Bad in a 22 episode season because of Buffy. The thing is Buffy only actually did that twice, in seasons 3 and 5, so why did I think of it as a major factor in the Buffy formula? It might have to do with episode 5 resetting the Big Bad in season 1, or that I had briefly mistakenly thought the Halloween episode of season 2 was an episode 5 which at least featured the Big Bad and introduced a minor recurring villain. Perhaps it oddly fits that in the last season episode 5 was the last appearance of a kind of important villain, Anyanka.
The fact that on Noir it was episode 5 that finally named it's antagonistic force was an interesting coincidence for me. I now know of at least one pre-Buffy show that did this, season 2 of Lois and Clark introduced Intergang in episode 5.
Both seasons that introduce the Big Bad in episode 5 have them then appear in episodes 6 and 8 with those being their only three appearances in the first 10 episodes. Maybe I simply always considered those two seasons the best at how they mapped out the Big Bad's role.
I already talked a bit about my history with Fan Fiction and Shipping where Buffy in particular Dawn was important, she was my favorite character.
I had kinda semi-forgotten just how much I valued Buffy and Angel. The other day I started watching The Passion of The Nerd's Buffy and Angel videos on YouTube and they really started bringing it all back to me. This hasn't lead to me re-watching any episodes yet and I don't think they will, I prefer to keep devoting my actual spare time to Anime and allow my memory of Buffy to remain how it is.
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